Rituals of distinction of the modern artist: flânerie, dandyism and bohème

Abstract

The text focuses on three attitudes through which the modern artist, in a ritualistic manner, publicly expressed distinction in nineteenth-century Paris: flânerie, dandyism and bohemianism. These attitudes distinguish him on the stage of a metropolis taken over by the masses and the bourgeoisie in which the artist identifies himself, mainly, with the flâneur, a key figure of modernity who creates a new type of gaze on a city which, in turn, also observed him. So was analyzed by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, as by Charles Baudelaire himself, the epitome of the modern artist and of a way of life continued by accursed poets such as Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. The analysis of these attitudes is supported by lithographic works, mostly signed by Honoré Daumier and Paul Gavarni, where some of the key features of metropolitan life and its most characteristic types are revealed from an acute and sarcastic perspective.